A Tale of Two
Sister Sleuths…or the Mysterious Life and Legacy of Edna Camilla Stratemeyer
Squier
Somewhere beyond the infamous lions that guard the New York Public Library and the secrets within, lies Box 46. Its very existence is found in the subterranean depths of Gotham, one that any would-be Nancy Drew researcher will soon discover to be a rite of passage in getting to the bottom of the Sleuthing Business.
Specifically, the Sister Sleuths business. But before we get into the Sister Sleuths, let’s take a moment and pay homage to the beginnings of one of the most famous teenage sleuths, Nancy Drew. Racing onto the scene just after the roaring twenties, was Nancy Drew in her spiffy blue roadster on April 28, 1930 with The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, and The Bungalow Mystery. She solved cases with a zeal girls hadn’t yet seen on the literary scene for juveniles. Missing wills, lost inheritances, secret passageways and hidden staircases, “hauntings”, mysterious lakeside sleuthing in creepy bungalows and even a mystery surrounding Lilac Inn, where chicken dinners were their specialty – missing diamonds too. Nancy even traveled out west to Shadow Ranch with her best friends Bess and George, solved a kidnapping, shot a gun and punched a villain. And that was just in the first five books!
Nancy Drew was the creation of Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate but that legacy that he initially built, would have to evolve quite dramatically and quickly when he passed away on May 10, 1930 just twelve days after Nancy Drew debuted. 1930 was a difficult year for the Stratemeyers. The country had been plunged into the midst of a Great Depression the previous October 1929 when the stock market crashed. The publishing industry was hit rather hard and some series faltered or went out of print. And with Stratemeyer’s untimely death, everyone held a collective breath, wondering what fate would have in store for series like Nancy Drew.
The answer to that quandary, was of course our Sister Sleuths, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Edna Camilla Stratemeyer, the daughters of Stratemeyer and now partners in crime at a rather perilous time. Without a male heir to inherit the business, Stratemeyer left his company to his wife, Magdalene. She was an invalid and incapable of running the company which left the business up in the air at a time when finding a buyer was a hardship. Publishers needed answers. How would they all carry on? Enter Stratemeyer’s capable assistant, Harriet Otis Smith who had been with him for around fifteen years and knew the business inside and out. While Stratemeyer’s daughter Harriet took to the idea of having a career with great delight, throwing herself into the learning curve, Edna held out a bit of hope for a buyer until she resigned herself to the reality that they would have to carry on their father’s legacy. By fall of 1930, the Syndicate was in their hands and they would have to build upon Stratemeyer’s legacy in order to succeed.
It’s the stuff of Nancy Drew intrigues complete with an underdog who rose to the occasion and helped save the day, secrecy born straight from the inner workings of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and a bitter rift among sisters which has led to the vanishing of Edna Stratemeyer’s full role from most historical records. There has been plenty of credit and accolades to go around between Edward Stratemeyer, his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and the original Carolyn Keene, Mildred Wirt Benson. But one of the real champions of Nancy Drew in the beginning and through the 1930s was the one sister who you may never have heard of or ever understood the impact of their legacy on Nancy Drew – Edna Camilla Stratemeyer Squier.
Both Harriet and her younger sister Edna grew up in a storybook house, their father, Edward Stratemeyer, spinning fanciful tales and trying out story ideas on the girls, who loved every minute of it. Harriet was the successful sibling in many ways – outgoing, a take charge personality, ready to conquer and very independent. Harriet excelled in schooling and went to Wellesley, married well to her husband Russell Vroom Adams, and had the whole family life, society clubs and children all wrapped up in a pretty box. Edna, on the other hand, was more fanciful and less practical than Harriet as a young girl. She was more of a homebody. She liked taking trips to the farm or the Jersey shore, the finer things in life, and was prone to anxiety and illness. She was sent away to boarding school in her teens but hated being away from home and so she ended up attending a local school to finish her basic schooling. She never went to University like Harriet, and little did she dream of having a career. She would also go on to be caregiver for her dad Edward when he was in poor health at the end of his life, and also to her mother, Magdalene, who was an invalid for those last few years of her life after Edward’s passing. Things didn’t always come as easy to Edna as they did Harriet and life for Edna changed quite dramatically when she joined forces with Harriet to run the Syndicate.
You’ve likely heard the story that Edna helped her sister out and then ran off to Florida to live in the Moss-Covered Mansion and was inactive in the business, letting her sister Harriet flourish and run the company for another 40 years. You’ve probably read that Edna was the difficult sister who didn’t just go quietly to Florida and retire and instead planted herself as a thorn in Harriet’s side, and there is truth to that. And that’s the legacy that Edna has been mostly given, an accolade here or there in a footnote of Nancy Drew’s history.
But what of the 1930s? You can’t talk about a near 100 years of longevity without giving props to those who stepped up and made a success of Nancy Drew in the beginning. How can anyone preserve and allow a history to endure in the collective pop culture without paying homage to the beginning? It was Edna who was a creative force in the world of Nancy Drew, among other series like Kay Tracey in the 1930s who helped build upon her father’s legacy. Thanks in part to Edna, Nancy Drew was outselling the boys’ series books by the mid-1930s. That first decade set the foundation for everything to come for decades after and is an intrinsic reason why Nancy Drew has endured and remained so popular. Unfortunately, Edna’s role has largely been overshadowed by others who outlasted her in the annals of Nancy Drew.
But thanks to a treasure trove of letters between Harriet and Edna over the decades in Box 46, the relationship between the two sisters and the unraveling of their partner-in-crime-ship is well documented. Letters in the beginning on their newly created Stratemeyer Syndicate letterhead run the gamut of fanciful and fun to later bitter and strained as time went on. It’s a sad testament to dysfunction among family, but also a championship of their role in shaping their father’s company and forging into unchartered waters to come out successful on the other side. Edna laments in a letter to Harriet, dated November 6, 1961, “His one complaint was that at his death everything would die with him.” Thanks to Edna and Harriet, his legacy has lived on in ways no one could have ever predicted.
Let’s go back to 1934 when the secrecy surrounding the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its inner workings had caught the attention of writer Ayers Brinser whose fantasy of what might be going on at the Syndicate was pondered in an article he wrote for the April issue of Fortune magazine. He compared Edward Stratemeyer to Rockefeller. Of Nancy Drew, he noted, “Nancy is the greatest phenomenon among all the fifty-centers. She is a best seller. How she crashed a Valhalla that had been rigidly restricted to the male of her species is a mystery even to her publishers…” Nancy even topped Bomba! Then he even hinted suspensefully that the Syndicate might be mistaken “…for a private detective’s office.” Calling All Sister Sleuths – Welcome to the Stratemeyer Syndicate Detective Agency!
Writing about a gray bobbed Edna who “waggled” her head at him and stated that “their business is their business,” he described the sisters as having inherited from their father, “not only that genius particular to fifty-cent juveniles, but his business acumen.”
Of the inner workings of the Stratemeyer Syndicate in East Orange, NJ in the Hale Building he described these “detectives” at work. “There they sit today at their ponderous roll-top desks dispatching the affairs of fifty-cent juveniles with a sincerity and belief in their work equal to that of the most serious adult novelist. Obscured in a fern-filled corner is a secretary. The only other occupants in the office are immortal: Tom Swift, The Motor Boys, The Rover Boys, Dave Dashaway and dozens of others who exist in the 800 fifty-centers that line the wall.” And of course, Nancy Drew who was outselling them all.
“So greatly do they feel the need of maintaining the illusion of these fictitious literati [the pseudonymous authors] that, inside of the great veneration in which they hold their father, they have refused to authorize any of the many attempts to write his life history.”
If we are to look at Edna’s stats from the 1930s until she left the day-to-day business of the Syndicate in 1942 and compare it to the other amazing creatives who helped breathe life into Nancy Drew, you’d realize the following:
Of all the outlines and plots created for the first eighteen books – Edward=4, HOS=1, Harriet=3, Edna=10. Of all of Mildred Wirt Benson’s books – 1-7, 11-18 (15 books), only 2 were outlined by Harriet, 4 Edward, 1 HOS, 8 by Edna. Of the 13 books produced during Edna’s active time at the Syndicate, 10 were outlined and plotted by her. Edna’s role in the creative process behind Nancy Drew is clear, yet has been largely overlooked throughout history.
When it comes to writing and editing, both Edna and Harriet were not professionally trained at that – they had to learn on the job and try and follow in their father’s footsteps before them. When it came to imagination, however, Edna was a little wilder than Harriet, more emotional, somewhat timid but anxious, prone to fancies like mysticism and spiritualism. In fact, when off vacationing at the shore, she wrote to her sister in an undated letter from the early 1930s of all the various goings on including this gem, “We all dropped a penny in the slot of a palmistry machine. We all got different fortunes – mine said in part, ‘about middle of life great good fortune falls to you through a death; see that you use it wisely…Did we laugh!’”
Some of Edna’s plots involved ghostly settings or mystics and spiritual themes that made them different from the first five Nancy Drew books that her father and Harriet Otis Smith worked on. Edna was a bit of a romantic, so you’ll find more romantic angles to her mysteries and a flair for suspense and drama. The Whispering Statue might as well have been set at the seashore where Edna frequently vacationed. Edna provided very different story lines and plots that gave real interest and intrigue to the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series than some of the basic though popular mystery elements in the first few stories.
In looking over vintage editions of books that Edna creatively oversaw from The Secret of Red Gate Farm to The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion, there are interesting elements that are evocative of Edna’s interests and personality. In Red Gate Farm, there’s a mysterious “nature cult” operating out of a cavern on an old farm, really a gang of counterfeiters. They masquerade at night in ghostly white costumes. The Clue in the Diary finds Nancy dealing with “Foxy Felix,” a patent swindler and a mysterious fire and diary to decipher. Nancy’s Mysterious Letter brings in a doppelganger of sorts – a Nancy Smith Drew and a lonely-hearts club swindler who takes advantage of women. Even the ending was unusual where the villain Edgar Dixon disappears leaving the reader to decide if he got away, or drowned. The Sign of the Twisted Candles introduced us to centenarian Asa and an old inn run by thieving innkeepers plus the fall out between Nancy and her chums over the will after Asa’s death. The Clue of the Broken Locket centers on two very self-centered actors who adopt, rather strangely, two babies. Nancy’s search for the real mother and father and the melodrama that ensues made this a rather different style of Nancy Drew book. In The Message in the Hollow Oak, we find Nancy in the wilds of Canada, after winning a radio contest and the intrigue of two lost loves and a hollow oak plus the dramatic dynamiting of a dam with Nancy racing away on horseback. The Mystery of the Ivory Charm finds Nancy meeting with the First Lady and a mystery that revolves around an ivory charm that has lifesaving properties inside which Nancy uses to save the young Coya in the end. In The Whispering Statue, we are introduced to Nancy’s new dog, Togo and whisked away to a seaside vacation where a statue whispers and a house dramatically is whisked away by the sea. The Clue of the Tapping Heels finds Nancy tangling with a strange temple and the mysticism angle plays out more prevalently in this story – even the Persian cats are a different angle for a Nancy Drew mystery. The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion is another intriguing yarn involving gypsies, a missing heiress and a lost fortune.
It was Edna through this creative side, who worked so closely in that process with ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson. Later in life, in the 1940s, when things were a difficult time period for both Mildred and Harriet – deaths in their families, the war years, and personal trials and tribulations, it was Edna who came to bat for Mildred when Harriet was having difficulties with Mildred’s output. Letters from Box 46 include comments from Edna about Mildred’s legacy. In a letter dated October 23, 1944, Edna noted, “Mrs. Wirt is certainly a go-getter and she must have a following, even if you find her difficult. Of course I always felt she adhered to my outlines and praised her for it. Her style made the Nancys.”
In a letter dated July 22, 1946, Edna responded to Harriet’s frustration over the manuscript for The Clue in the Old Album. “Regarding the Nancy story, it seems to me I’ve heard that same trouble ever since we started working. You and I never could agree on how a Nancy should be written. I always felt Mrs. Wirt was excellent at sticking to a plot which pleased me very much. You had another plan by which you gave her little material and permitted her to fill in as she chose. Up to date no one has appeared in the writing list who has the experience and the ability to turn out a first class girls’ story, - a true mystery I mean.” Edna insisted on seeing the outline that Harriet had written for Old Album, “I should like to see the outline she received for the last story before I consider dropping her…after all her years of work mean something to her too.”
Edna’s is a story for the ages. She’s the underdog who steps up to preserve her dad’s legacy and continue on - who delves into the inner workings, learns as she goes the creative side and comes into her own in a career she’d never dreamed she’d have. Then the spinster sister finds romance (Mr. Squier) in her personal life and gives birth to her daughter and changes course again in moving away to Florida, affecting the business in ways that would come to pass in the coming decades. I think it highly likely Edna was rather competitive with Harriet and just as stubborn. It is unfortunate that they butted heads and created such a rift that Edna’s contributions were left to letters buried in Box 46 and in footnotes or rarely mentioned in publicity or books – almost written out of existence by her sister Harriet. Even her death on March 26, 1974 was but a brief mention in Harriet’s diary, “Edna Squier passed away.” Thanks to these letters we can uncover the exploits and adventures of Edna and how she helped shape Nancy Drew’s enduring legacy.
Edna’s ability to rise above odds stacked against her and thrive in the short decade that she remained active at the Stratemeyer Syndicate was a testament to her enjoying life more independently after her mom passed a few short years after her father. She was a bit of a late bloomer. It was Edna’s take on Nancy Drew picking up where her father left off, adventuring Nancy to Red Gate Farm and beyond, combined with Russell Tandy’s covers and Mildred’s writing that cemented Nancy Drew as a popular icon who would go onto endure and still be in print nearly 100 years later.
No matter what you think you know about the history behind the Stratemeyer Syndicate and Nancy Drew, there’s clearly a lot more to learn than meets the eye. This is just the tip of the iceberg on Edna’s involvement in that legacy, one that will be more heavily covered in my biography of Mildred Wirt Benson that I’m working on. Edna’s life, though filled with health issues and a rather bitter back and forth with her sister Harriet involving mistrust, control and other issues in the last several decades of her life, is a life in which we must celebrate the earlier good old days in which she was a real part of something groundbreaking. Two women running a company in a very male dominated publishing industry, bucking trends and succeeding. Edna deserves to be recognized for what she and her sister did for their father and for the legacy of these wonderful series books. Edna will never again be a footnote in the history of Nancy Drew or as Harriet once described her to a reporter, as “helper for a few years.” Edna’s work with Nancy Drew was one of the key reasons for Nancy’s success in that first decade when the series was cemented into the pop culture to come and it’s a legacy that we all owe Edna recognition for.
